


Everybody Knows

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:04:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard Cohen has a few things to say about Simon's problems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Knows

_Everybody knows that the boat is leaking  
Everybody knows that the captain lied  
Everybody got this broken feeling  
Like their father or their dog just died_ ("Everybody Knows," Leonard Cohen)

1.  
 _Everybody knows you've been discreet  
But there were so many people you just had to meet  
Without your clothes_

The comm sounded, reaching Simon way down at the corner of Dream and Less.  
"Simon," Inara's voice said. There was a long pause. "Please come to my shuttle" A long breathy pause.. "I need your help." In the dark, he scrubbed his palm against his leg ( _Wearing pants. Good._ ) He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stuck shoes over his feet. He reached under the mattress and thumbed the safety off and chambered a round. Out in the corridor, he blinked at the light.

Once inside the shuttle, he saw almost-white with rage: Inara, naked, crouched over a naked man on the floor. _Damn you to hell, get someone else if your customer demands a voyeur_ until he realized what she was doing. Compress. Breathe. Compress some more.

There was an oxygen mask in a case on the wall, he remembered seeing it there, on a long afternoon playing mah-jongg and eating nougat. He tried to put the gun in his pocket but his sleep pants didn't have any pockets ( _Like a shroud_ , he thought) so he put the gun down on a low carved tray table. Simon opened the cabinet's elaborately enameled doors, pulled out the mask, got the valve open. "You're doing very well," he told Inara. "Here, use this. I'll go get my medical bag. No, wait. I'll go get the stretcher. With the wheels. We'll take him to the MedBay and I can sort this out there." He opened the door to her wardrobe, found a house kimono blocked in blue carp, and reached it to her, over his shoulder.

The gun, forgotten, stayed on the table.

2\.   
_If you want a boxer  
I will step into the ring for you  
And if you want a doctor  
I'll examine every inch of you_

"How long before you called me?" Simon asked, taping the IV into place. He waited for the computer to analyze the blood sample it had just drunk down with the celerity of a starving vampire.

"No time at all, to speak of," Inara said. She sipped at a pleated white paper cup full of the bad prescription brandy. "He clutched at his left arm. And obviously he couldn't breathe. So I pounded on his chest with one hand and the comm with the other!"

"Okay…okay," Simon said to the readout screen. "Yeah. MI, not CVA. Yeah. Body weight…" he did the arithmetic in his head. He filled a syringe and slammed it into the valve on the IV tubing.

"His vitals don't look too bad," Simon said. "Did you get, well, you know…uh…did he beforehand…?"

"Take care of my present? Yes, he did," Inara said, touched that he had thought to ask.

"Then in that case, I'd suggest that you bring his clothes and things in here. He's uh, well, he'd probably not going to be too happy to see you right around when he wakes up. So I can help him get dressed and call for his driver to take him home."

Inara put her hand on Simon's bare shoulder and kissed his cheek. "Thank you," she said. "You are a true friend."

When she left his head was still ringing from the aura of her perfume and he wondered if there was any medical journal that would publish his discoveries about penile migraine.

Simon sat down on the stool next to the treatment couch and dozed off until a groan from the patient awoke him. He checked the read-out—vital signs stable and normal—and slipped out the IV. "I'm afraid that you had a heart attack—a minor heart attack—"he told the portly elderly gentleman who was trying to sit up. Simon tilted up the back of the treatment couch. "But I gave you a shot and you're better now. Do you have a chauffeur, or someone you can call to take you home? Even if you feel well, you shouldn't drive. And do see your own doctor as soon as you can."

The patient checked his wallet, put on his clothes, and stood up cautiously. His legs stayed under him. He gave Simon a narrow appraising look, then smiled. "I'm impressed," he said. "Companion first-aid training is a lot better than I'd have expected."

Simon reddened, angrily, but before he looked up from the floor he realized that there was no point at all in correcting the misapprehension.

"Here," the man said, handing Simon a business card. "Have your House Priestess wave me with the next time you'll be in town. I'm sure I'll be fully recovered by then." Neatly folded, behind the business card, was a 500-credit note.

Simon, of course, still didn't have any pockets so he slipped the bill into his shoe and headed toward the kitchen because maybe a cup of camomile tea would help him sleep for the rest of the night.

River and Jayne were already there, playing Chinese checkers at the table.

"Couldn't sleep," River said.

Simon put the business card down on the table and headed toward the kettle.

River began to scream.

2  
 _I've been running through these promises to you  
That I made and I could not keep_

Simon put his arms around her and pulled her tight for the whateverth time. "What is it, love? What's wrong?"

The card—now that it occurred to Simon to read it—said "Alan VanRoosten, Educational Pharmacology Consultation Group."

"He juggled the barrels of acid," River said. "We were all etched. And he wrote it down in a little notebook."

"Where'd you get that?" Jayne asked.

"He was Inara's client. There was a…a small medical problem."

"So why didn't you cause a real big medical problem?"

"Jayne, I didn't know the man from Adam's off ox. How could I?"

"Oh God that I were a man," River said. "I would eat his heart in the marketplace."

Jayne yawned and headed toward the door. "Don't worry, Short Stuff," he said. "Now that he knows, your bro' will take care of him for you. Take care of him the right way, that is. To make up for bein' a gorram fool."

"No!" Simon said, and wheeled toward his sister. "River, you have to trust me," he said. "You're {{crazy}} marked by what you've gone through. That' s only natural. And if I could make you better by killing him slowly—by killing him slowly in front of a large audience including many law-enforcement officials—then I would. But what I have to do is make you better, not make other people worse."

"I thought you were going to leave father and mother and cleave to me," River said.

3  
 _I'm aching for you baby  
I can't pretend I'm not  
I need to see you naked  
In your body and your thought_

"I was furious," Simon said. "And humiliated. That this is what I've come to—cadging tips. And I thought about all the wonderful things I could buy if I didn't just spend the whole thing on anxiolytics for River. Decent coffee. Fresh lichis. Towels that aren't made of sandpaper. Except the trouble with crime is hiding the proceeds and I would truly rather die than have any of the people here find out about this. He was gone before I had a chance to throw the money back in his face. If I'd had the strength. If I hadn't been worried about making myself too conspicuous. And, anyway. you can't go around punching your patients, can you?"

"I suppose not," Inara said. "Don't think of it as a tip. Think of it as payment for being called out at night on an emergency."

"But I'm not a doctor any more, am I? I'm merely the least promising registrant in a youth training scheme for apprentice assassins. Inara," he said. "I know—what's expected of me. And I can't do it. "

"Maybe you're just too decent to do it."

"Maybe your profession requires you to tell people what they want to hear. Even though I can't afford you." _Well you've got five hundred credits_ the little voice in his head that he generally managed to ignore told him.

 _I didn't think **you'd** insult me_ Inara thought, but gave him some leeway for being upset. "Simon, neither of our jobs gives us the luxury of working only for good people. Certainly in my case, and quite often in yours, good people wouldn't need our services."

Inara opened up a three-panel screen. Between the two carved wings was a full-length mirror. She leaned over Simon, a wing of her hair waving over his shoulder. "Look at us," she said, her hands at his waist. "Aren't we beautiful together?"

"It's another tip, isn't it?" he said. "I don't need a mercy fuck from you."

"You can be a damned difficult person to befriend," Inara said.

4  
 _Ah you loved me as a loser but now you're worried that I just might win_

"Captain," Simon asked, "Why are we still here? Inara certainly doesn't want to stay here and be reminded of…and there's nothing here for anyone else."

"Yeah, well, mostly, they're waitin' for the Little Black Prince to put down his gorram skull and get off his ass and do somethin'. What, are you scared to go up against this fellow?"

"Maybe," Simon said.

"It's six to three against."

"And I'll take that under advisement when my life turns into the fucking Supreme Court." (Simon remembered Wash saying, "Out here, we have to take care of each other. There's nobody except each other. So we can't let each other down." And it still stung.)

"Maybe I was wrong about somethin' else too," Mal said. "Somethin' Kaylee said made me think of it. She says now she's glad you never figured out how to unzip your pants, 'cause she wouldn't want to do it with no one who hates the way we live."

"It's what you chose," Simon said. "You and Kaylee and Jayne and Zoe. And Wash followed Zoe. I didn't choose it."

'Get a TS slip from the chaplain," Mal said. "Your sister's got with the program. She knows the way we live out here. And if you can't get yourself in line with the way you have to think where you gotta be, then which one of you's crazy?"

5  
 _The moon's too bright  
The chain's too tight  
The beast won't go to sleep_

"*Damn*, Simon," Jayne said. "What kind of man are you? Why're you still here and that guy still breathin'?"

Simon said. "I know that—that I was happy when Dobson was killed. When Mal killed him. So his blood is on my hands too. There've been too many dead bodies since then and I don't want a share in any more. I'm just trying to get my self-respect back."

"Look harder, boy," Jayne said. "It's prolly in the cupboard. behind 'Nara's virginity."

Simon swung at Jayne, connecting to no great effect beneath Jayne's cheekbone, and then said "You have no call to…" and stopped talking as Jayne half-turned, slammed his elbow into Simon's solar plexus (because it don't to do let 'em put their hands on you) and kicked him in the ribs when he hit the ground (but not very hard because after all it was just the Doc).

 _Now that_ Simon thought, _Was an anti-violence statement worthy of Gandhi himself._ and as usual he was curled up on the floor with far too many spectators to just pull a pillow over his head and sob.

'C'mon, River, honey," Jayne said. "We're goin' huntin'."

6  
 _They don't let a woman kill you  
Not in the Tower of Song_

"Hoist in his own peter," Jayne said. "He wasn't thinkin' with his dick, who knows how long it wouldda took us to find him?"

"We're guided by the beauty of our weapons," River said.

"This gotta be it right here," Jayne said, looking at the enameled oval plaque fixed to the low adobe wall surrounding the house and its grounds. It matched the card in his pocket.

There wasn't a bodyguard posted in front of the door; there was one right inside, but Jayne came in shooting and damn if the other security staff didn't come to investigate, and that was that in a burst of semi-automatic fire. And there were probably servants, but they had the good sense to keep their heads down. And then the man himself, who should have known better, walked down the stairs and goggled at the sticky pools and shattered flesh on the parquet.

"Here, darlin'" Jayne said, and handed River a quotidian, nameless sawed-off shotgun. "He's all yours." He stood behind her, his hands at the sides of her waist to stabilize her, and the recoil slammed the hollow of her back into his groin over and over again until the gun was empty.

River punched the air. "Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?" she crowed.

"Looks about regular to me," Jayne said.

River gave one of her crooked smiles, one of those dismaying peeks inside the cracks and grabbed the bulge in Jayne's pants. "Man-parts," she said.

"Yeah, well, don't mean nothin', just the way you were bangin' up against me. Don't worry, you got nothin' to run to Mal to bitch about."

"Too bad it don't mean nothin,' River said, her hand poised on the zipper. "Isn't it funny how vengeance always makes you hungry and horny?"

"That guy down there had his last piece, that's for sure," Jayne said. River ripped down the zipper and shoved her hand inside the fly. Jayne groaned. River threw her arms around his neck and boosted herself up, by which point he assisted by cupping his hands under her ass, plenty to support her negligible weight.

"You tried to sell me out," River said after the first time she came. "For money."

"Did you think I was a gorram choirboy? When did I tell you that?"

"You could have apologized," River said.

"A man never got a woman by begging on his knees," Jayne said.

Jayne wondered if killing that guy, fucking Jayne, or both would somehow lift the spell, but no, she was as crazy as ever, just in a good mood this time.

7  
 _The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor  
And there's a mighty judgment coming but I may be wrong_

"And here comes the TS Slip That Walks Like a Man," Simon said.

"Doing the right thing isn't always comfortable," Book said. "In fact, I daresay it usually isn't."

"If I'm so fucking holy then why can't even I stand to be in the same room as myself?" Simon said, hating but unable to eradicate the brattish whine.

"The values of creation take more energy than those of decay, " Book said. "And water only rolls downhill, unless you pump it."

 _All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky  
The holy books are open wide  
The doctors working day and night  
But they'll never ever find that cure for love_


End file.
